Introduction to DITA

This page contains information about how to use DITA for authoring Eclipse Help.

DITA is an XML format designed especially for authoring Help information. Several WTP components have DITA-based Help, but up until know, the DITA source has not been checked into CVS. Instead the generated HTML has been checked in and privately kept in synch with the DITA source. The main reason for this cumbersome process is that the tools to process DITA have been proprietary.

DITA-OT

But all that has changed with the availability of the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) project at SourceForge. Now there is a freely available toolkit so anyone can author using DITA. The DITA Open Toolkit Home Page contains extensive documentation about DITA-OT, including notes on how to run the Ant scripts to build Help documentation.

Initial DITA Contribution

The initial contribution to WTP of DITA Help source has been attached to bug 131837.
This source and build scripts tailored to Eclipse have been committed to HEAD and will be released to WTP 1.5 M6 pending successfully testing.

Some folks on the DITA-OT project have been asking for examples to illustrate the problems. All the code is in CVS. Here are the links to the five Help plugins we are startings with:

These plugins have been released as tag v200604111302 and will be in the WTP 1.5 M6 build.

Next Steps

Add DITA build to WTP batch build

Delete generated HTML from CVS

Add support for multiple ditamaps per plugin

Add support for infopops

Problems Integrating DITA-OT into Eclipse

Here are my notes on integrating DITA-OT into Eclipse:

I've resolved as many of the problems as possible for now and have commited the
DITA source and build scripts for the 5 plugins that Kate attached. Kate reviewed the generated
HTML and corrected a few DITA markup errors. The initial contributions have been released as
v200604111302.

There are a few outstanding problems:

Integration with releng Not Done Yet

The first stage is to have both the DITA source and the generated HTML and
XML in CVS. I need to iron out the remaining problems before integrating the
DITA builds into the releng builder.

When you edit the DITA source, run the
build.xml Ant script to regenerate the HTML and XML. You need to install the
DITA-OT1.2.1 beta on your development machine. This version corrects a critical
bug that prevents the scripts being run in Eclipse due to an Ant error.
The critical bug is: 1431229 hardcoded path in MessageUtils.java

DITA-OT1.2 does not work with Eclipse. You need DITA-OT1.2.1 which is currently a beta. Download the code form the following URL:

Then unzip it to C:/DITA-OT1.2.1 (see the build.xml for the property).

Generated plugin.xml is Bad

The scripts generate bad plugin.xml files. I have therefore preserved the
good copies as myplugin.xml. Our build script copies myplugin.xml over the
generated plugin.xml, so make any edits to myplug.xml.

maplist Builds Not Supported

The scripts generate code from a *.ditamap file as input. However, the IBM
contribution uses *.maplist files which list one or more *.ditamap files. Two
plugins have two *.ditamap. To workaround this, please ensure that there is a
"master" *.ditamap that pulls in all the *.dita files. We'll try to upgrade the
scripts to support *.maplist files as input.

CSS Doesn't Match Eclipse Style

The *.css files that come with DITA-OT use a different style than Eclipse.
They have been copied into the org.eclipse.wst.doc.user plugin. These *.css
files, e.g. commonltr.css must be edited to give the correct style for Eclipse
Help.

To fix this problem, copy the contents of common.css to the bottom of commonltr.css.

Sporatic "Access denied" Build Failure

I am hitting sporatic build failures while building modified DITA source files.
I have reported this problem to the DITA-OT dev list.
The problems occurred while I was connected to my LAN with an Ethernet cable
but dissappeared when I was wireless!!!!!